


Kingside Knight

by CyanHorne



Category: Criminal Minds
Genre: Agent As Unsub, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Dark, Canon-Typical Violence, Case Fic, Gen, Sort've. It's weird.
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-10-24
Updated: 2014-02-18
Packaged: 2017-12-30 08:41:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 7,719
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1016502
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CyanHorne/pseuds/CyanHorne
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jason Gideon, the infamous "White Knight" killer, walks into the bullpen on a bright Wednesday morning to turn himself in. His ten-year investigation has always been little more than a game, leaving the BAU to scramble for answers and search for the meaning behind his latest move. Little do they realize, the White Knight always plays three moves ahead. And he's got a secret weapon just waiting in the wings to change the rules...</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Jason Gideon walked into the bullpen of the FBI headquarters in Quantico at ten-twenty-five on a bright Wednesday morning.

For a long while thereafter, no one noticed. He didn’t appear, at first glance, to be anything impressive. At best, he was in remarkable shape for a man two years shy of sixty. The wrinkles in his smile and eyes softened a face that might otherwise be strong and cold. He kept his graying hair trimmed close to the scalp and dressed like a college professor, missing only the leather patches on the elbows of his coat.

He walked straight to the front of the bullpen, not announcing his presence, merely watching the dozens of agents as they scurried through their daily tasks. Not a one of them took notice until the intern assigned to update the Most Wanted list glanced up from his work and choked on his recognition of the man he’d just placed at Number One.

Moments later, a dozen agents abandoned their files, drew their service pistols, and trained them on the intruder. Jason Gideon only smiled and raised his empty hands.

Dumbstruck, the gathered agents stood down and allowed the Behavioral Analysis Unit to make the arrest. After all, he was their case. They’d hunted him for years now, especially these last few months. It was only right that they close the door on the investigation.

But even they couldn’t guess how one of the most prolific serial killers in American history managed to walk straight into an FBI facility without detection. No doubt, that was exactly how Gideon liked it.

 

* * *

 

_“How dreadful…to be caught up in a game and have no idea of the rules.”_

_–_ author Caroline Stevermer


	2. Chapter 2

The FBI interrogation room at Quantico’s “Facility” was bright and clean and plain. The lights, which could be cranked up or dimmed depending on the agents’ needs, blazed white to chase every shadow from the room. For some guilty minds, the hum of those florescent lights was itself a form of torture. 

Jason Gideon was not one of those minds. He sat at the plain table with his hands folded, twiddling his thumbs and smiling like he hadn’t a care in the world. He might have been a husband waiting on his wife in a restaurant, looking forward to a rare night without the kids.

He’d been sitting there a little over an hour when Special Agent Derek Morgan of the BAU entered with a folder under one arm. Built like the former football star he was, Morgan was often perceived as a sort of muscle-bound enforcer, but his position at the FBI had been earned through brains, not brawn. He sat down across the table and placed the folder between him and Gideon.

The White Knight Killer, as he was known to the general public, turned his smile to the younger agent as though they were sitting down to coffee, not an interrogation. “‘Morning, Agent Morgan. Or is it afternoon? It’s so hard to tell in here.”

This was the first time that Jason Gideon and Derek Morgan had ever entered the same room, let alone exchanged words. That the killer knew his name sent a cold child down Morgan’s spine. He suppressed it, keeping his expression neutral. “Gideon…”

“Please,” said the killer. “Call me Jason.”

Morgan inclined his head, granting him the barest acknowledgement. “All right. Jason.”

“May I call you Derek?”

“No.”

Morgan opened the file. Gideon made a tsk-tsking sound with his tongue, like a disappointed teacher. “Now that’s just not friendly.”

Morgan ignored him, pressing on with the protocol. “There a reason you haven’t called a lawyer yet? I know you know your rights, man.”

Gideon shrugged. “Never needed anyone’s advice before. Don’t see any reason to start now. You know, you’re not the man I thought I’d see right off the bat. Where’s ol’ Hotch gotten off to?”

“Agent. Hotchner,” said Morgan, enunciating his Unit Chief’s proper title. “Is busy. Too busy to deal with the likes of you.”

“Oh, I doubt that.” Gideon’s smile never wavered. “After all, he still hasn’t thanked me for cleaning up Foyet.”

George Foyet, the Boston Reaper, had been Gideon’s only kill in the eight-year stretch between sprees. His body, riddled with non-fatal stab wounds delivered prior to the killing headshot, had been dumped inside Hotchner’s apartment and discovered upon the agent’s return from a particularly brutal case. A chess piece – Gideon’s signature, the white knight – was found in the executed murderer’s hand, laying claim to the kill.

Morgan made a point of not reacting to the statement, keeping his eyes on the case file. He flipped through the pages and pages of murders, spanning ten years and over two-dozen victims, recalling all the facts he knew by heart until he decided that the silence had stretched long enough.

“Let’s start at the beginning,” he said, returning to the start of the file. “You were born in 1953. Your parents –”

“I’m going to stop you right there,” said Gideon, holding up a hand and shaking his head again, like a schoolteacher walking a problem student through his assignment. “Listen, Derek. I can tell you’re a good cop. You’ve been well trained, you’re following protocol, and your powers of deduction are no doubt worthy of acclaim. But I wrote the book on interrogating suspects of serial homicide, and I can tell you right now that where I was born, what my parents were like, all that crap, none of it matters. In this particular case, all that matters, Agent Morgan, is that in 1978 when I was 25 years old I entered the Federal Bureau of Investigation and stumbled in on the ground floor of what was then called the Behavioral Sciences Unit. And from that point on, my life slowly but steadily went straight to hell.”

This time, Morgan gave into his creeping urge and turned towards the one-way glass between them and the observation room. He raised an eyebrow in consternation. On the other side, Special Agent In-Charge Aaron Hotchner pressed his lips into a thin, white line.

A handsome and stoic man, Agent Hotchner looked the very picture of a professional in his pressed suit and tie. For the whole of Morgan’s interview, he’d stood there, his gaze locked on the casual smile of the man he had, a lifetime ago, admired.

To think that the great Jason Gideon had fallen so far…Even after all these years, it didn’t seem quite real.

The observation room door opened and closed behind him, announcing the arrival of SSA David Rossi, the BAU’s most senior active agent. With his graying hair and neatly-trimmed beard, Rossi could have been Gideon’s brother. In a way, he had been. Back in the ‘good old days’, all budding profilers had been brothers-in-arms.

Dave stepped quietly behind his Unit Chief, arms folded in the small of his back. He met Aaron’s eye in their faint reflection in the glass. “So,” he said. “How’re we doing?”

Hotch sighed, rolling his shoulders, which had gone stiff from nearly an hour of standing with his arms crossed. “Morgan conducts himself well. He’s confident, he’s stayed on point, he followed all the proper interrogation protocol…”

“…But?”

“But he’s getting nowhere.” Hotch narrowed his eyes at the White Knight’s smug expression, matching a gaze that he knew was intended for him. “Gideon’s playing with him.”

“Of course he is,” said Rossi, nodding in understanding. “He’s playing with all of us. He always does. Our investigation, the chase, it’s all just a game to him. You know that as well as I do.”

Hotch scowled. Of course he knew. It still didn’t fit. “Then why turn himself in? Why end the game?”

“That is the question.” Rossi stroked his oh-so-neat beard, letting a silence lapse in the observation room. They stood in silence for a long moment, watching Gideon ignore Morgan in favor of staring at a glass he couldn’t see through.

“Something’s changed,” muttered Hotch, giving voice to their shared thoughts.

“A secondary trigger,” agreed Rossi with a nod. “At the very least.”

Hotch set his jaw, their mutual train of thought rolling through his mind. “Eight years ago we nearly caught him,” he said. “He went underground to avoid detection, only killing once in nearly a decade.”

“That we know of.”

“That we know of,” Hotch agreed. There was always the chance that Gideon had changed his M.O., hiding his crimes in variation and mobility. He was certainly smart enough to pull it off, and he knew more than enough about criminal psychology to play at faking multiple different killers. “After all that waiting he comes back out of nowhere, kills fifteen people over the course of three months, and turns himself in. Why? What’s the point?”

“That’s what we need to figure out,” said Rossi solemnly.

For the first time since he’d entered the observation room, Hotch broke his gaze with Gideon. His decision was made. There was no time to lose. “Is the team ready?”

“They’re waiting for you in the conference room.”

“Then let’s go.”

They left the observation room together, leaving Morgan to his interrogation and the White Knight Killer to smile at an empty mirror, as though he knew full well that they had gone.

* * *

 

True to Rossi’s word, the BAU’s remaining members awaited their senior agents in the round table conference room. With Morgan in interrogation, a feminine presence dominated the room, tempered by an anxious aura as each agent focused on their respective tasks.

Emily Prentiss, the team’s most recent addition, sat nearest the door, her dark eyes scanning the profiles of Gideon’s many criminal victims. Two empty chairs waited to her right, forming a barrier between her and the unit’s youngest, Elle Greenaway. Penelope Garcia, their designated technical analyst, occupied the chair on Prentiss’s left. She tapped furiously on a laptop, code flying across its LCD screen. Between Garcia and Greenaway lay two more empty seats, one of which was soon to be occupied by media liaison Jennifer “JJ” Jareau, who was currently busy prepping a slide display of their case summary.

Hotch strode in with Rossi a step behind, instantly grabbing the agents’ attention. Hotch snagged the chair to Greenaway’s left and tossed his case file onto the table.

“Right,” he said by means of greeting. “We’ve got three hours.”

“Only three?” asked JJ, settling into her chair. Across from her, Rossi also took his seat, his frown telegraphing his disapproval of the politics that forced Aaron’s hand.

“The Director wants Gideon processed and transferred to a federal hold facility as soon as possible,” said Hotch. “He also wants press coverage of the transfer to advertise the arrest. Think you can handle that, JJ?”

“I’ll take care of it.”

“Good. Let’s debrief.” Hotch opened his case file, the other agents mimicking his shift to the record’s beginning. “I want all of us on the same page, so someone’s always ready to take over the interrogation. We can’t let up on him for even a minute. I trust we all know who we’re dealing with?”

The collected agents nodded. JJ clicked the remote to start up her slides, filling the flat screen with the smiling face of the White Knight Killer. It was an old picture, taken from an FBI file that was twenty years out of date. Without the gray or the wrinkles, Gideon looked brighter. Younger. Less corrupt.

“Jason Gideon,” began Prentiss, reciting the summary they’d heard in a dozen profiling classes during their training for the BAU. “Fifty-eight years old, severed twenty years with the FBI before taking early retirement following the deaths of his wife and teenage son.”

“That was the stressor,” said Elle, pressing her pained lips together with a mix of empathy and disgust. “Shortly thereafter he started killing. Motivations are textbook mission-based offender, the supposed avenger of wrongs. He targets anyone he profiles as a potential criminal, mostly men but also some women, with a particular focus picking off serial offenders before the proper authorities can bring them in.”

“First time around he killed twelve people in eighteen months,” said Rossi. His file lay closed on the table in front of him. Gideon’s case had been one of the last he worked before entering retirement of his own. It hadn’t stuck, obviously, but he still knew the case and the offender better than almost anyone. “That was eight years ago. Right as we closed in on his location he went underground. Fell completely off the radar and managed to avoid arrest.”

“He’s smart,” said Prentiss. There was no admiration in his town, just a statement of fact.

“Of course he is,” said Rossi in response. “He’s one of us.”

Greenaway clicked her tongue, shifting through the write-ups of all Gideon’s known murders. “They say serial killers make the best profilers. Guess it works both ways.”

The team went quiet, each remembering the words of Friedrich Nietzsche, burned by training and repetition into every profiler’s brain: _“He who fights monsters should see to it that he himself does not become a monster. And if you gaze long into an abyss, remember that the abyss also gazes into you.”_

It was always a risk, their job. They spent their professional lives exploring the criminal mind. It was a dangerous place. Sooner or later, someone was bound to get lost.

Prentiss was first to shake off the funk. “So, he goes underground and claims only one kill in eight years…is it possible that he might have committed other crimes in that time and just didn’t take the credit?”

“It’s almost certain,” said Hotch, switching from the case file to a notepad. “That’s one of the many things we need to find out while we have him. Elle, I want you in there as soon as Morgan’s done. Don’t bother stewing him, just go, hit him hard and fast. Prentiss, you need to be ready to take over the moment Elle’s done.”

Greenaway glared at the other agent across the table. Prentiss ignored her. Though they maintained a fair professional relationship, the two young women maintained a fierce rivalry. Partially, it was a seniority conflict, pitting Emily’s age and experience against Greenaway’s time on the BAU. Partially, it also came from Elle’s aggressive, competitive nature, which clashed with Emily’s preference for diplomacy and reason.

Still, the team was better for having both women on board. Gideon would no doubt react differently to each of them, which Hotch planned to use for all it was worth.

“Garcia,” he said, turning to the perky tech. “What’ve you got?”

Penelope’s bright blue eyes flickered momentarily from her screen before diving right back into her work. “What I’ve got, boss man, is this flash drive – the only thing Mr. Grody had on him at the time of his arrest.”

She tapped the fold-out, red-and-black jump drive currently jammed into her laptop’s USB. “There’s a ton of data here, but unfortunately all the files have been heavily corrupted. I can reconstruct them on my babies but it’s going to take a while…”

“Garcia, from where on out those files are your top priority,” said Hotch. “The moment you find anything, anything at all, I want to see it.”

“You got it, sir,” said Garcia. She brightly snatched up her laptop before scurrying to rejoin ‘her babies’ in the technological nook that was her domain.

As she left, Hotch pulled back his sleeve and checked his watch. “Morgan should be nearly finished with his interrogation. Prentiss, Greenaway, you’re with me. Dave, you’re on research – call up everyone you can from the old days, anyone who might have known Jason when he was at the Bureau.”

“I’m on it.”

Hotch nodded gruffly, snatching up his file. JJ was already on the phone with her local media contacts. Greenaway and Prentiss hurried to their feet. With a last glare at Gideon’s old picture, the team dispersed, each to their duties. The clock was ticking. It was time to get to work.

* * *

 

The moment Morgan left the interrogation room, Elle Greenaway blew in like a raging storm. The two agents met in the hall, pausing only to exchange a quick glance. Morgan offered a raised eyebrow of ‘Good luck,’ and received a curt nod of thanks before Greenaway strode by.

She gave Gideon all of sixty seconds before she stormed in, exuding confidence and power. She tossed her case file onto the table and fixed the man with her fiercest glare. Jason Gideon seemed as calm as ever, twiddling his thumbs and counting off the seconds under his breath. He lifted his eyes deliberately to match Greenaway’s, the soft hint of a smile never fading from his lips.

Elle scowled at him, settling in the chair and leaning over the desk to match his pose. She stared him down for nearly two minutes before finally demanding, “Well?”

Gideon quirked his head to one side. “Well what?”

“Do you know who I am?”

Gideon spread his hand with an amicable shrug. “Should I? We haven’t been introduced…”

“Cut the crap,” snapped Greenaway, tapping the file with her intricately-manicured nails. “I know you’ve been stalking the BAU. You knew Morgan on sight, so that means you know exactly who I am.”

Gideon only shrugged again with that same irritating nonchalance. “If you say so,” he said, and threaded his fingers together once more.

Greenaway fumed, feeling heat rise under her collar and ears. She clenched her jaw and put pressure on the old filling in the back of her mouth that always helped to focus he thoughts. He knew her, all right. He knew her temper and pride. He was trying to goad her into losing her cool. She would not give him what he wanted.

She opened the case file and made a show of turning to the exact page where Morgan left off. “Tell me about your wife.”

“So direct,” Gideon sighed.

“I don’t have time to play around.”

Gideon hummed to himself and rocked his head from side to side. He lifted his head from the conversation and squinted at a high point on the one-way mirror, as though trying to peer into the observation room beyond. “What time do you think it is? Must be around noon by now.”

“Her name was Sarah,” said Greenaway, projecting her voice to overcome his and force them back on-topic. Gideon lowered his gaze to her with another flicker of disapproval. Elle pushed on. “That’s right, isn’t it? Sarah Jacobs?”

Gideon pursed his lips and began to wring his hands. Both were listed in profiling texts as signs of distress, but in the White Knight, Greenaway read only impatience. She could practically read the thoughts as they ran through his mind: _“Stupid little girl, you are wasting my time.”_

Elle’s blood began to boil. She forced herself to remain in control.

“You met her during your undergraduate studies, separated for a while, and reunited during your first five-year tenure with the FBI. The two of you dated for a several years, got engaged shortly after you joined the BAU, and married another year after that. Five years later you had a son…”

“Steven,” said Gideon softly. His hands stopped wringing. His jaw relaxed. He sounded almost…sad.

Greenaway closed her file. She lowered her voice to match his. “Tell me about him. Tell me about Steven.”

“He was thirteen when he died.”

A shudder ran up Elle’s spine. Jason Gideon spoke of his own son’s murder as casually as he’d asked about the time. In her years with the BAU, she’d faced dozens of monsters – killers, rapists, sadists, torturers, every combination imaginable – but these men who turned off their emotions as easily as a light switch still left her cold.

Gideon’s smile returned. Either he’d lost himself in happy memories or could see through her masks and enjoyed watching her squirm. “He loved baseball, my boy. Absolutely loved it. Best second baseman his team ever had. Sarah and me, we called him the Little Fox, after my favorite player from the nineteen-fifty-nine White Sox. I was so proud.”

For a split second, Elle saw Jason Gideon as the man he might have once been – not the White Knight Killer, but the agent of the FBI. A good man, a good father, worn down by the horrors he’d seen but still standing strong. The sort of man her father might have been if he’d survived.

Then reality came crashing back, ruining the illusion.

“That’s why Frank took his arm first. Sliced it right off –” Gideon brought his left hand to his right shoulder and mimed it sawing into his skin. “Right at the shoulder. Cauterized the wound. Kept him alive like that for five whole days.”

Greenaway’s mouth went bone-dry. She swallowed to moisten her tongue and kept a firm grasp on her own disgust. “Frank…You mean Frank Breitkopf,” she said slowly. She recalled the many reports she’d read during training that contained the name. The Route Thirty Butcher was one of the most infamous and prolific serial killers of all time. He’d killed dozens, and would have kept on killing if he hadn’t been caught. “You knew him, right? Before he…before the attack.”

Gideon laughed ruefully, sending another shudder through Greenaway’s bones. She knew ‘attack’ was too soft a word for what Breitkopf had done. It was nothing less than a massacre.

“Knew him? I caught the sick bastard. Sadistic sociopath, right to the bones. Dismembered nearly a hundred people all along the country. Took us years to track him down, years. If anyone ever deserved to fry, it was him.”

Slowly, Elle lowered her hands beneath the desk and lay them on her knees, flexing and stretching her fingers. She steadied her breathing and kept her expression as neutral as possible.

_‘Keep him talking,’_ she told herself sternly. _‘The more he talks, the more we’ll know…’_

She could handle this. She was a seasoned agent. She’d read all the files. She knew what was coming, and she could handle it.

“He didn’t, of course,” said Gideon, his smile never fading. “Slipped away, the old snake. Lost his trailer and all his souvenirs, but managed to get the drop on some local LEOs and disappeared into the night. No one heard from him for two years. Not until he came for revenge on me.”

He paused, his eyes flickering up again as though checking on a non-existent clock. As he brought them back down, he reached across the table, patting Elle’s case file in a manner that was almost fond.

“It’s all in here, I’m sure. All the gory details.” He flashed Elle a charming grin, reminding her that, even with all his darkness and age, he was still a very handsome man. “Are you sure you want to hear it all out loud, Agent Greenpeace?”

“Greenaway.” Elle bit the tip of her tongue, cursing her moment of weakness and the squeak of her voice on the last vowel.

“My mistake,” said Gideon with another of his infuriating shrugs. He leaned back in his chair as though reminiscing on his front porch, idly crossing his legs at the knee. “Anyway, the details aren’t important. What’s important is that Frank Breitkopf came after my family in our new cabin, well away from city limits and anyone who could have heard us scream. We were there for a week’s vacation. Frank used every bit of that time, all to get back at me.”

His voice held and edge that betrayed his fury. By the end of the ordeal, his wife and son were dead and dismembered. Jason alone had been left whole, dumped on the steps of a hospital, barely breathing. He’d survived, but whatever lift he had before then was long gone.

“Of course, I got him back in the end. It all evened out. Justice was served. That’s the way it should be.” The corners of Gideon’s lips curled further, his smiling widening. He leaned over the desk, closing the distance between them. “Wouldn’t you agree, Agent Greenaway?”

For a moment, Elle’s mind went utterly blank. Then she pushed through the white noise and choked out, “Excuse me?”

Gideon hummed casually, twiddling his thumbs. “I seem to recall hearing about a serial rapist case a few years back. Attacked women at and around a Bible college. The suspect’s name was William Lee. Officially, he’ll always remain a suspect. Because before your team could bring him in, _you_ shot him.”

Elle clenched her hands into fists. Oh yes, she remembered that case, clear as day. The sick bastard targeted women who wanted children. He raped them a gunpoint in a twisted effort to fulfill their desires. She’d set herself up in a safe-house as bait, tailoring persona to match his victim pool. And yes, he’d come after her in the house. But that…

“That was self-defense.”

“Officially,” said Gideon flippantly. “But you and I know better, Agent Greenaway. You did exactly what you had to, to make him pay.”

Elle’s blood caught flame like a match dropped into oil. In the next second she was on her feet, hands slammed flat against the table, yelling, “How _dare_ you, you…”

A knock on the one-way mirror brought her back to her senses. Her hands stung. Her chair lay on its side, rattling against the tile floor. Her shoulders trembled with barely-contained rage.

The signal was clear: that was enough. Her interrogation was over.

Jason Gideon smiled up at her, as calm and restrained as ever. He even had the nerve to see her off with a little wave and a bright, “See you again, Agent Greenaway,” like they were old friends. Elle stormed from the room, face flushed, ears burning, cursing the man and everything he represented.

After all this time, he was still playing a game. On this front, he’d already won. 


	3. Chapter 3

Elle burst from the interrogation room, her cheeks flushed with anger and shame. Damn that bastard. Damn him! How could she have let him get the advantage?

Her fury nearly bowled over Prentiss, who stepped back to avoid the heavy door as it banged open and shut. She was, as Hotch had ordered, ready to take over in an instant. She wore her best suit – which cost twice what Elle’s did – and her every hair remained effortlessly in place. With case files in hand, she should have immediately swooped in to recoup the embarrassing failure.

But she didn’t. She spoke. “Elle.”

Greenaway came up short, but didn’t turn around. She clenched her fists to hide their furious trembling. “What?” she snapped. There was a lecture coming, she just knew it. The last person she wanted to hear it from was Little Miss Perfect.

She heard those fine, patent leather shoes take a single quiet step nearer. The gentleness of the voice that followed startled her from her sulk. “You know none of us believe that. Right?”

Elle peered at the older woman out the corner of her eye.  Sincerity radiated back. Emily Prentiss could fake and hide many things, but her candor was not one of them.

“No one on the team…” Prentiss paused, seemed to reconsider her words, and cleared her throat to start again. “No on in the Bureau believes that you acted in anything other than self-defense. You didn’t take the law into your own hands. We all know that.”

For a moment, Elle’s mind left the hall and wandered back through time and space. She saw the dark house she’d occupied for the ruse, saw the headlights pull up outside her window, saw them go dark. She heard the front door open and saw William Lee peer in. She felt the gun in her hands, smelled the oil and gunpowder, heard the sound of the shot.

Then she was back. She deflated, shoulders going limp. “I could never do something like that.”

“I know.” Prentiss took another step closer, until they were almost near enough to touch. If she’d been anyone else on the team, Elle knew that Emily would have laid a hand on her shoulder. She’d burned too many bridges between them to earn such a kindness now, but the thought was there. “He’s just trying to rile you up.”

Greenaway sighed and shook her head, hair rustling as she cleared her muddled thoughts. “He’ll rile you up, too.” She turned to Prentiss and gave her a single nod. “Be careful.”

“I will. Thanks.” Emily’s perfectly painted lips twitched into a confident smile. She returned Elle’s nod, then turned on her heel and strode into the interrogation room.

* * *

 

When the door to the secondary meeting room opened, Rossi glanced up from the many case files and raised a salt-and-pepper eyebrow at Greenaway. “That didn’t take long. What happened?” 

“Don’t ask.” Elle tossed her files onto an open chair and took in the room, which had been transformed into a mini-gallery of all things White Knight. Evidence boards lined every wall. File boxes and folders covered the table. It was a complete mess, and yet Ross was the only other agent to be seen. “Where’s Morgan?”

“In with Hotch.” Rossi gestured vaguely towards the interrogation room, then went back to thumbing through autopsy reports. “Still observing, most likely. They’ll be in there a while.”

Greenaway frowned. Hotch’s obsession with Gideon came as no real surprise; after all, he’d known the man and then been targeted with a corpse in the kitchen. But Morgan…hm…

“Did Morgan know Gideon? Before?”

Rossi glanced up again, regarding Elle carefully. He’d been retired by the time Morgan came on board, but she knew that he – like Gideon – kept tabs on the BAU even in his downtime. He’d been a friend to Hotch in the early days. He knew almost everything.

“Not that I know of,” he said, pushing the stack away and busying his hands with another. “But I’ll bet he still feels like he owes the bastard for bringing Hotch on board.”

Ah. Gideon had been the one to coax Hotch out of the courtroom and into the FBI. Years later, Hotch used those legal skills to present a superior – who had attempted to block Morgan’s BAU promotion on account of his race – with the detailed threat of an anti-discrimination lawsuit, which scared the bigot into submission. Without that, Morgan could have been barred from the position he’d more than earned all because of an ‘old boy’ who couldn’t accept change.

“Those two don’t like being indebted,” continued Rossi, “especially not to people like Gideon. Can’t blame them for that, but it doesn’t matter too much in the end.”

Wrong. It did matter. No Gideon meant no Hotch, which mean no Morgan and, more than likely, no Greenaway either – his glowing recommendation had no doubt made her transition from Sex Crimes a hundred times smoother. Hotch knew talent when he saw it, no matter what the old guard said. He’d made the BAU better than it had ever been before. When you looked at it that way, they all owed Gideon for bringing him in.

_We don’t owe him **shit**._

Elle bit her tongue and turned her attention to the evidence boards so Rossi wouldn’t see her fury. The first thing she found there was a map. It always chilled her when they pinned up a map of the entire United States. In high school, she’d had one just like it on her bedroom wall, full of push-pins marking all the places she wanted to visit on the open road. Now, all she could picture was the twenty or thirty serial killers hiding their bodies along that vast road network at any given time.

On this one, Gideon’s murders were picked out using color-coded flags. Green covered the initial dozen of eight years ago, twelve bodies spread across fifteen states and the length of the continent. Blue marked the second spree, fifteen more victims found up and down the east coast in the last three weeks. A single red flag in Virginia stood out as an anomaly. It marked Hotch’s apartment and the remains of George Foyet.

Elle drew on her memory of the case and picked out the three pins designating the dumping grounds of Frank Breitkopf’s many scattered limbs. During his own reign of terror, scattering dismantled bodies along the freeway had been one of his favorite methods; by crossing state lines, he’d hidden his body count so well they were still piecing together the fragments of his victims.

But that hadn’t been Gideon’s purpose. He never hid anything, not even a fingerprint. He spread Frank around to give the sadistic bastard a taste of his own medicine.

Elle could almost relate. Almost.

_Stop that_.

She pursed her lips and forced herself to shut the empathy down. She was not like Gideon. She would never be like Gideon. She would not become a monster.

She turned from the map to check the standard-issue wall clock that hung at the back of the room. It was half-past one. She sighed. “Two hours left.”

“If that,” said Rossi with a shake of his head. “Hope JJ can keep the press in line. With a high-profile case like this, the Director’ll want to get him out for the cameras the moment they’re ready to strike.”

Greenaway sighed and sank into a chair. “What a pain.”

“We have more than enough to put him away,” continued Rossi, though his dispassionate tone betrayed how he felt about that. “He’ll never see the light of day once the courts are through with him. Whether we get all the answers or not, this will all end today.”

Except that it wouldn’t. Rossi could feel it in her gut. This was no end game, no way for a criminal mastermind to go out. There was no climax, no finale. It just…stopped. After a decade of plans and plots, Gideon would never end it like this. He was too historonic. There had to be something more.

Rossi knew it too, but there was nothing they could do. With nothing else to go on, all they could do was scour the records for anything they’d missed and wait to see what happened next.

* * *

 

Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock.

No clock hung in the interrogation room, but Prentiss heard one anyway. In their sullen silence, Gideon’s fingers fell against the tabletop in the familiar rhythm, counting out the seconds with patient aplomb. It made for an odd technique. Most killers, in Emily’s experience, would have gone for the lub-dub of a pounding heart. But Gideon chose to count the time. Was he waiting for something?

She filed the thought away and turned to her digital watch, careful to keep its face out of Gideon’s sight. She’d been there ten minutes, sitting without a word. That was long enough.

Gideon stopped tapping. When Emily glanced up, he was smiling at her. “Got the time?”

Prentiss tugged her sleeve over the watch, denying the man what he wanted. It was a dominance play, establish her control. She knew it. He knew it. She knew he knew and he knew _she_ knew. That shared knowledge transformed this interrogation into a chess game, both thinking three moves ahead. The one who kept the lead would take the win.

Emily opened her case file. She slid it across the table until it bumped into Gideon’s hands. “Tell me about Frank.”

A dozen glossy crime scene photos spilled onto the table, unhooked before entering for exactly this effect. Most were dark and grimy, stained with violent red. Severed limbs scattered the floor of a burnt-out camper. A single gunshot to the temple betrayed the C.o.D. An abandoned arm, found two states over, clutched a white knight in its rotting hand.

Gideon’s face remained black as he looked over the shots. He shook his head and pushed the folder back to Prentiss. “You already know what happened to Frank.”

“I want to hear your side,” said Emily, forcing the file back until it stuck in the space between them. “What happened out there? How did you know he was in West Virginia? Why cut him up after he was already?”

Gideon shrugged and said nothing, refusing to either gloat or refuse credit. His guilt was no question. There’d been substantial evidence, from blood to finger prints to the severed ear found in his abandoned car. All of it had been deliberately planted, to lead to him.

He glanced up again, looking not at her but at the top of the one-way glass. Prentiss pulled her folder back and casually reorganized the photos, deciding to jab in from another direction.

“They put you on medical leave after the death of your family.” The slightest disgust flickered over Gideon’s eyes. “You suffered a major depressive episode, so they kept you under watch and set up psych evaluations every week. But you know how to cheat those.”

“As do you, Agent Prentiss.”

A shallow blow. Of course Emily could circumvent psych tests. She’d learned how even before she joined the Bureau. Nothing about that was unusual, not in the BAU.

“So once you fooled the psychiatrist into think you were stable, they lowered the observation to protective duty, and that’s when you slipped away…”

“Off to the mountains to track down Frank, yes, yes. Obviously, you know it all. You are wasting time.”

Gideon spread his hands with a dramatic sigh, as though throwing his frustration onto the table. The gesture was mild, put-upon and retrained. He held up a hand to stop Prentiss before she could press on.

“I assure you, agent, that everything you need to know about Frank Breitkopf can be found in either _that_ file or in his. There are more important things to discuss now.”

In five seconds, Emily weighed the value pre-offered information with the symbolic loss of control that came from letting him lead. Finding it worthwhile, she set the folder aside. “Fine. What’s on your mind?”

Again, Gideon’s eyes flickered to the window. Was he looking at Hotch? No, the gaze was too high. So what did he want?

“Can you guess, Agent Prentiss, what I intended to do after I finished with Frank? Originally?”

‘Originally’ meant he’d changed his plans. The use of a euphemism indicated that he’d distanced himself from his crimes. Repeated use of her name and title attempted to establish rapport.

Prentiss folded her hands, mirroring Gideon’s comfortable posture. “No,” she said. “Though I assume you planned your escape to the letter.”

“On the contrary. I fully intended to return to DC and turn myself in. Figured I’d let the system take its proper course. But then I realized…it’s already run its course. And it’s failed.”

Emily took a slow breath, masking her disgust and sick anticipation. Jason Gideon was a mission-based killer. A vigilante. This would be his manifesto.

Other killers would have dropped their masks by now, letting their true selves shine through. But Gideon’s face remained calm. It occurred to her that this may be his true self: calm, measured, always calculating, and completely without remorse. The thought made her feel ill.

“You know,” he said, with the warm candor of a college professor addressing his class. “Normal people consider those like Frank to be monsters. To them, they’re demons. Animals. Boogiemen, lurking in closets. But you and I – this whole team of ours – we know that’s not true. They’re not monsters. They’re a disease, and we are their cure.”

Unbidden, Prentiss remembered the recordings she’d seen of Gideon lecturing on profile techniques to the young cadets of the FBI. He’d used exactly this tone, pacing before a slide projector, never turning an eye to the horrors splashed onto the wall. This was how he’d first appeared to Hotch and to countless other trainees. He’d been a leader. A mentor. A friend.

“The work we did here – that you all still do here – it’s good work. But it’s out of date. Strains of the disease have evolved beyond the BAU’s capacity to treat. So I evolved the treatment to match.”

It took all of Prentiss’s self-control not to start picking her nails – a tick she’d picked up years ago to deal with nerves. “So what you’re saying is, you wanted to eliminate the killers that we couldn’t reach.”

Gideon beamed. “Exactly right.”

Something didn’t add up. Emily selected another file from her stack. “Then why target Agent Hotchner?”

Gideon frowned. “I never targeted Hotch.”

“You left a body in his apartment.”

The killer laughed. It sounded warm, but Emily shivered.

“The Reaper? No, no, that was a gift. The BAU made me, you’re like family. It’s only right to keep an eye on family and to protect them when needed. That’s why. I protected Hotch the same way that I protect you, Emily.”

All of Prentiss’s three-moves-ahead thinking ground to a halt. She stared. “What?”

“Oh?” Gideon quirked his head with child-like curiosity. “You didn’t hear about Ian? You should call your friends at Interpol. They’ll tell you.”

For all of a second, Emily sat frozen in shock, hardly able to believe her ears. Then she bolted to her feet and dashed out the door, cellphone in hand.

* * *

 

“What the hell was that?”

Of course, it was a rhetorical question. Hotch had no better way of knowing the answer than Morgan, but it relieved the younger agent somewhat to voice their mutual confusion.

On the other side of the glass, Prentiss had gone ramrod stiff. Her knuckled turned white, clenching the table’s edge. Morgan could see her shoulders tremble. A second later, she bolted, leaving the case files behind. Hotch darted past Morgan to follow her into the hall. Derek lingered just long enough to catch a final glimpse of Gideon – the arrogant dick – grinning at the window without a care in the world.

Morgan gave chase. He and Hotch emerged to find Emily fumbling with her phone. Beneath her make-up, she’d gone pale as a ghost.

“Prentiss,” said Hotch, closing the distance between them. “What happened in there?”

Emily nearly dropped her phone. Her jumpiness unnerved Morgan more than anything. This woman had once volunteered to take a brutal beating in a hostage situation to save a child services worker the same fate. She’d faced down murderers, rapists, and psychopaths without blinking and eye. Hell, she’d interrogated sadistic torturer-killers in that same room a dozen different times and always walked away without a hair out of place. Yet, one line from Jason Gideon left her rattled.

Morgan curled his hands into fists and stepped to Hotch’s shoulder, scanning Emily’s eyes for answers. “Who’s Ian?”

Emily tightened the grip on her phone, pulling it in protectively. “I…I can’t tell you.”

“Why not?” asked Hotch.

“It’s classified.”

Mentally, Morgan cursed. If he never had to deal with government secrets again, it would be too soon.

“Look,” said Prentiss, before Hotch could press for more info. She glanced up at the clock hanging above their heads. “I need you to make a call. As soon as I know more, I’ll tell you, I swear. Just...trust me. Okay?”

Hotch fixed her with his thousand-yard stare, the one that always made Morgan feel like his very soul was being scrutinized. Emily matched him measure for measure. With a nod, Hotch let her go.

Morgan let out the air he hadn’t realized he was holding. His hands curled into fists, nails digging into his palm. He wanted to kill that gray-haired son of a bitch. Gideon had disrupted Morgan’s team, putting Hotch on edge for weeks and taunting them with his damn state-hopping. He’d dug his fingers into old wounds and threatened two of the strongest women Morgan had ever known.

He had, in short, messed with Morgan’s family.

Nobody messed with Morgan’s family.

Derek took a deep breath, reigning in the old instincts that urged him to beat that smug bastard into a pulp. He glanced Hotch to find his team leader looking back, Out of everyone, Hotch had taken this case the hardest. He needed to know that they all his back.

“You want me to go in again?”

“No.” Hotch looked at the wall clock that Prentiss had checked a minute before. His brow furled in thought. “He’s waiting for something.”

Morgan raised an eyebrow and lifted his gaze to the clock. The motion felt familiar. He’d seen it somewhere before…

It dawned on him: Gideon. This was what he’d been doing the whole time. Another clock, exactly like this one, hung in the observation room. It always had. Gideon couldn’t see it, but he knew it was there.

“The tapping,” muttered Morgan, working through his thoughts out-loud. “He was counting seconds. And he kept asking for the time even though he knew we wouldn’t give it.”

“He’s waiting for something and he wants us to know it.”

“But what? What the hell could he do from in here?”

“Hotch!”

Both men turned at the call to find JJ rushing towards them with quick, professional strides. Unlike Prentiss, who could hide her feelings with a mask, Agent Jareau channeled her nerves into a vibrant energy that would have made her glow on screen. Only the slightest loss of breath as she caught them betrayed how afraid she really was.

“I just got a call from the Arlington police. They found another body with Gideon’s signature.”

On instinct, Hotch reached for a case file but it hadn’t been shipped. His brow wrinkled. “They’re sure?”

“Positive. C.o.D. single gunshot wound to the head, same caliber as the others. A chess piece was found in the right hand. A white knight.”

“When was it found?”

“An hour ago.”

Morgan groaned. This was not looking good.

“Could it have been dumped earlier?” asked Hotch.

JJ shook her head. “Based on traffic patterns, it couldn’t have been there more than ten minutes before it was found. The M.E.’s put the tentative time of death at ten-thirty this morning.”

“While Gideon was turning himself in,” said Morgan with a sigh. He ran a hand over his shaved head and looked to his boss. “Hotch, you know what this means.”

They all did. Hotch sighed.

“Gideon has a partner.”


End file.
